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Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

anthropic.com

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Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#81

Post by ghuntley »

lostmsu wrote: post #78
ghuntley wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will shortly; am building a serious self-compiling compiler rn out of an brand-new esoteric language. Meaning the LLM is able to program itself without training data about the programming language...

I would hold on on making grand claims until you have something grand to show for it.

Honestly, I don't know what to make of it. Stage 2 is almost complete, and I'm (right now) conducting per-language benchmarks to compare it to the Titans.

Using the proper techniques, Sonet 3.7 can generate code in the custom lexical/stdlib. So, in my eyes, the path to Stage 3 is unlocked, but it will chew lots and lots of tokens.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#82

Post by StefanBatory »

ghuntley wrote: post #42
malfist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs absolutely don't replicate staff+ engineers. If your staff engineers are mostly doing things AI can do, then you don't need staff. Probably don't even need senior

That's my point. - L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads) - L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads) - L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads) These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwe…

I wonder what will happen first - will companies move to LLMs, or to programmers from abroad (because ultimately, it will be cheaper than using LLMs - you've said ~$500 per day, in Poland ~$1500 will be a good monthly wage - and that still will make us expensive! How about moving to India, then? Nigeria? LATAM countries?)

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#83

Post by zoogeny »

istjohn wrote: post #80
zoogeny wrote: post #29

So I have been using Cursor a lot more in a vibe code way lately and I have been coming across what a lot of people report: sometimes the model will rewrite perfectly working code that I didn't ask it to touch and break it. In most cases, it is because I am asking the model to do too much at once. Which is fine, I am learning the right level of abstraction/instruction where the model is effective consistently. But wh…

Why do you think it's supposed to be cheap? Developers are expensive. Claude doesn't have to be cheap to make software development quicker and cheaper. It just has to be cheaper than you. There are ways to use LLMs cheaply, but it will always be expensive to get the most out of them. In fact, the top end will only get more and more costly as the lengths of tasks AIs can successfully complete grows.

I am not implying in any sense a value judgement on cost. I'm stating my emotions at the realization of the cost and how that affects my ability to use the available tools in my own education.

It would be no different than me saying "it sucks university is so expensive, I wish I could afford to go to an expensive college but I don't have a scholarship" and someone then answers: why should it be cheap.

So, allow me the space to express my feelings and propose alternatives, of which scholarships are one example and creative programs are another. Another one I didn't mention would be the same route as universities force now: I could take out a loan. And I could consider it an investment loan with the idea it will pay back either in employment prospects or through the development of an application that earns me money. Other alternatives would be finding employment at a company willing to invest that $100/day through me, the limit of that alternative being working at an actual foundational model company for presumably unlimited usage.

And of course, I could focus my personal education on squeezing the most value for the least cost. But I believe the balance point between slightly useful and completely transformative usages levels is probably at a higher cost level than I can reasonably afford as an independent.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#84

Post by owebmaster »

mikeg8 wrote: post #62
owebmaster wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesn't. If you are still looking for product market fit, it is just cost. After 2 years of GPT4 release, we can safely say that LLMs don't make finding PMF that much easier nor improve general quality/UX of products, as we still see a general enshittification trend. If this spending was really game-changing, ChatGPT frontend/apps wouldn't be so bad after so long.

Finding product market fit is a human directional issue, and LLMs absolutely can help speed up iteration time here. I’ve built two RoR MVPs for small hobbby projects spending ~$75 in Claude code to make something in a day that would have previously taken me a month plus. Again, absolutely bizarre that people can’t see the value here, even as these tools are still working through their kinks.

And how much did these two MVPs make in sales?

If they just helped you to ship something valueless, you paid $75 for entertainment, like betting.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#85

Post by fcoury »

twalkz wrote: post #38
zomglings wrote: post #6

If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, your billing for Claude Code is hostile to your users. Why doesn’t Claude Code usage count against the same plan that usage of Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are billed against? I upgraded to the $200/month plan because I really like Claude Code but then was so annoyed to find that this upgrade didn’t even apply to my usage of Claude Code. So now I’m not using Claude Code so mu…

I’ve been using codemcp ( https://github.com/ezyang/codemcp ) to get “most” of the functionality of Claude code (I believe it uses prompts extracted from Claude Code), but using my existing pro plan. It’s less autonomous, since it’s based on the Claude chat interface, and you need to write “continue” every so often, but it’s nice to save the $$

Just tried it and it's indeed very good, thanks for mentioning it! :-)

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#86

Post by cma »

bambax wrote: post #68
zomglings wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/day seems reasonable as an upper-percentile spend per programmer. $500/day sounds insane. A 2.5 hour session with Claude Code costs me somewhere between $15 and $20. Taking $20/2.5 hours as the estimate, $100 would buy me 12.5 hours of programming.

Asking very specific questions to Sonnet 3.7 costs a couple of tenths of a cent every time, and even if you're doing that all day it will never amount to more than maybe a dollar at the end of the day. On average, one line of, say, JavaScript represents around 7 tokens, which means there are around 140k lines of JS per million tokens. On Openrouter, Sonnet 3.7 costs are currently: - $3 / one million input tokens => $…

That's how it works, everything is recomputed again every additional prompt. But it can cache the state of things and restore for a lower fee, and reingesting what was formerly output is cheaper than making new output (serial bottleneck) so sometimes there is a discount there.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#87

Post by ghuntley »

StefanBatory wrote: post #82
ghuntley wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point. - L3 SWE II - $193,712 USD (before overheads) - L4 SWE III - $297,124 USD (before overheads) - L5 Senior SWE - $377,797 USD (before overheads) These tools and foundational models get better every day, and right now, they enable Staff+ engineers and businesses to have less need for juniors. I suspect there will be [short-to-medium-term] compression. See extended thoughts at https://ghuntley.com/screwe…

I wonder what will happen first - will companies move to LLMs, or to programmers from abroad (because ultimately, it will be cheaper than using LLMs - you've said ~$500 per day, in Poland ~$1500 will be a good monthly wage - and that still will make us expensive! How about moving to India, then? Nigeria? LATAM countries?)

The industry has tried that, and the problems are well known (timezones, unpredictable outcomes in terms of quality and delivery dates)...

Delivery via LLMs is predictable, fast, and any concerns about outcome [quality] can be programmed away to reject bad outcomes. This form of programming the LLMs has a one-time cost...

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#88

Post by datavirtue »

fcoury wrote: post #7
zomglings wrote: post #6

If anyone from Anthropic is reading this, your billing for Claude Code is hostile to your users. Why doesn’t Claude Code usage count against the same plan that usage of Claude.ai and Claude Desktop are billed against? I upgraded to the $200/month plan because I really like Claude Code but then was so annoyed to find that this upgrade didn’t even apply to my usage of Claude Code. So now I’m not using Claude Code so mu…

I totally agree with this, I would rather have some kind of prediction than using the Claude Code roulette. I would definitely upgrade my plan if I got Claude Code usage included.

I don't what you guys are on about but I have been using the free GitHub Copilot in VS Code chats to absolutely crank out new UI features in Vue. All that stuff that makes you groan at the thought of it: more divs, bindings, form validation, a whole new widget...churned out in 30 seconds. Try it live. Works? Keep.

I'm surprised at the complexity and correctness at which it infers from very simple, almost inadequate, prompts.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#89

Post by k__ »

zoogeny wrote: post #29

So I have been using Cursor a lot more in a vibe code way lately and I have been coming across what a lot of people report: sometimes the model will rewrite perfectly working code that I didn't ask it to touch and break it. In most cases, it is because I am asking the model to do too much at once. Which is fine, I am learning the right level of abstraction/instruction where the model is effective consistently. But wh…

That's why I like Aider.

You can protect your files in a non-AI way: by simply not giving write access to Aider.

Also, apparently Aider is a bit more economic with tokens than other tools.

Re: Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding

#90

Post by dist-epoch »

owebmaster wrote: post #84
mikeg8 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding product market fit is a human directional issue, and LLMs absolutely can help speed up iteration time here. I’ve built two RoR MVPs for small hobbby projects spending ~$75 in Claude code to make something in a day that would have previously taken me a month plus. Again, absolutely bizarre that people can’t see the value here, even as these tools are still working through their kinks.

And how much did these two MVPs make in sales? If they just helped you to ship something valueless, you paid $75 for entertainment, like betting.

You can now do 30 MVPs in a month instead of just one.
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